NAIROBI, Dec 8 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - Former child soldiers in South Sudan said they took up arms to defend themselves after being beaten and almost drowned by government soldiers, and they might return to the battlefield if their lives do not improve, a UNICEF ambassador said.

LONDON, Oct 7 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - Women in South Sudan have suffered unprecedented levels of sexual violence in the last two years, including abduction, rape, forced marriage and murder as civilians became targets of merciless ethnic warfare, the head of the Red Cross mission there has said.

LONDON, Oct 7 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - Traumatised by his experiences as a child soldier in South Sudan, 14-year-old Peter decided to settle an argument with two other children by taking an AK-47 from the local military barracks to shoot them.

LONDON, Aug 19 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - Globally, one third fewer aid workers were killed, wounded or kidnapped in 2014 than the all-time high of 460 in 2013, because fewer were deployed to dangerous regions, according to the group Humanitarian Outcomes.

LONDON, July 7 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - A cholera outbreak in war-torn South Sudan has killed at least 32 people, a fifth of them children under five, and schools have a major role to play in stemming the spread of the disease, the United Nations said on Tuesday.

More than 700 cholera cases have been reported in the capital Juba and Bor, the capital of Jonglei state, in the last five weeks, according to the U.N. children's agency UNICEF.

JUBA, Feb 13 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - In South Sudan's capital, Mary Nyapini Malual watches her children jostle over a plate of stew and pancakes, grateful they are safe from a government she believes wants to kill them.

It has been more than a year since Malual ran from clashes that broke out after months of tension sparked by President Salva Kiir's decision to fire former vice president Riek Machar.

Since then tens of thousands of people have been killed and over two million forced from their homes in the violence.

JUBA, Feb 11 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - At the edge of the airport runway in South Sudan's capital, a pickup truck of red bereted soldiers watched as young girls danced barefoot to welcome President Salva Kiir home from peace talks in Ethiopia.

JUBA, Feb 6 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - In the swampy frontlines of South Sudan's conflict, women spend hours pounding wild fruits, water lilies and grasses to feed their children, just two months after the harvest.

Aid workers fear famine will again threaten South Sudan in the next few months if forces loyal to President Salva Kiir and his rival Riek Machar continue to shell food distributions, loot aid and menace humanitarian staff.

NAIROBI (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – The number of centres in South Sudan offering inpatient treatment for children suffering from severe malnutrition has almost halved since 2013 due to conflict, the United Nations children’s fund (UNICEF) said amid warnings of famine.

NAIROBI (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – Young children are being left behind in Kenya while their parents are deported or sent to camps, rights groups said, as police have rounded up thousands of immigrants in an anti-terrorist operation.

WASHINGTON (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - A lack of clear-cut and secure land rights means people from post-conflict African countries are prevented from getting the most out of the land they rely upon for their survival.

NAIROBI (AlertNet) – Malnutrition rates in Sudan’s war-torn border states have doubled to 30 percent as starving people, denied humanitarian aid, eat just one meal every three days, activists said on Friday as they urged the African Union (AU) to launch an inquiry into what they called “crimes against humanity”.

LONDON (AlertNet) - Tens of thousands of Sudanese refugees sheltering in camps in South Sudan's Maban county face a major outbreak of water-borne diseases due to flooding and shortages of clean drinking water, aid agencies warn.

Oxfam said on Friday that at least 16 refugees have died of hepatitis E in the past few weeks, and aid workers fear the figure could rise in the coming months.

NAIROBI (AlertNet) – Sudanese refugees who are stranded in South Sudan with almost no water will start dying in large numbers unless aid agencies respond immediately to what is now a “full blown emergency”, the medical charity Medecins Sans Frontieres has warned.

Some 16,000 people are camped along a dirt road in Upper Nile State after fleeing fighting between the army and rebels in neighbouring Sudan. MSF said they would run out of water in eight days.

Aid workers say refugees in the region are already dying of dehydration and diarrhoea.

Children run and play as the skies above Leer airstrip in Unity State of South Sudan rumble. The clouds swell, it slowly gets grey and the sun retreats. Many children in the conflict prone border areas would not sing for the rain to go away. Roads drink the rains and get overly soggy and impassable, which helps quiet the drums of war. In these places it rains peace.

NAIROBI (AlertNet) – Half a million South Sudanese are stranded in Sudan, where they moved many years ago to escape the war back home. They don’t have the necessary papers to legitimise their stay or to return to the newly independent South Sudan.

The African Union has called for the situation to be urgently resolved. “The southern citizens in the north have become not only de facto stateless, but are extremely vulnerable,” it said in a statement last week.

NAIROBI, April 25 (AlertNet) - The United Nations will open a new refugee camp in northern Kenya to shelter a possible influx of Sudanese and South Sudanese fleeing escalating conflict between their two countries.

LONDON (AlertNet) - Aid agencies have called on Sudan to urgently extend a looming deadline for up to 700,000 southern Sudanese to quit the country, with one rights group warning it could create a “logistical nightmare and humanitarian catastrophe”.